They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.
Among the observations made by Alobar during his first few weeks as a citizen of Aelfric were these: (1) "Here the people bury their dead not in communal mounds but in individual graves. Now that I have come to regard death as a private challenge rather than as a social phenomenon to be exploited-once it has occurred-for the common good, as my clan regards it, I wonder if Christianity may not have something in its favor, after all."
(2) "The priest of the manor reminds me to no end of Noog. He is absorbed with his position on the estate and manipulates everyone, lord, lady, and serf, alike, to better his station and to tighten the Church"s grip on the society. There resides, however, in a hut of sticks beyond the fringe of the village, another kind of priest, a wise old man called a shaman. The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet, he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest. Perhaps that is why the priest despises him."
(3) "The main vegetable consumed in Aelfric is the turnip. With my clan it was the beet. Could that explain why these people are so docile and mine so fierce?"
More than once during his first year in Aelfric did ex-king Alobar reconsider applying for a va.s.salic position with the lord of the manor. The life of the peasants was brutally hard. In return for the lord"s protection, they had to work for a prescribed number of days a week on his lands. In the few remaining hours, they plowed, seeded, and harvested their own meager holdings and performed an endless succession of ch.o.r.es, such as chopping wood, butchering game, shearing sheep, digging ditches, drawing water, mending roads, carting manure, and building carts in which to cart still more. In the quiet ache of evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow, a sound that merged in his ear with the echo of the switch on the ox"s hide.
By then, gray had overtaken one of every four hairs on his head, and some nights he would pluck those pale hairs as if they were petals, saying to Frol, "If I wasn"t elderly when our clan decreed I was, I soon will be. Harsh labor pierces the rosy membrane of youth and lets the shriveling brine seep in."
Nevertheless, the work-worn months held satisfactions. The novelty of one wife continued to fascinate Alobar. Frol remained as devoted as when he was her sovereign, and she showed signs of maturing into a woman as s.e.xually adept as Alma and only slightly less intelligent than Wren. With her company he was content, and when she issued twins, one of each gender, that first November, a new dimension was added to his life. Back in his home city, his offspring had been raised communally in a nursery adjoining the harem. The nursery was a female province, as foreign to his bootsteps as the serpent-seared cliffy of the edge. Now he discovered children, and the discovery blew blasts of sugar into every chamber of his heart.
When Alobar had enough energy, he cataloged his experiences and observations and tried to profit from them, to what end he could not say. Because Christianity emphasized the value of the individual, in the Roman scheme every person had his or her place. In the frame of mind in which he"d been since first he was violated by the hair, this concept appealed to him, providing food for mental mastication.
The peasants were a dull lot, by and large, but they had exhibited extraordinary kindness in helping the strangers set up housekeeping in a flea-bitten cottage with a dirt floor. Their friendliness increased after first Frol (out of conviction) and then Alobar (as a strategic maneuver) agreed to be baptized in the name of their exclusive G.o.d. However, certain activities were conducted in the village from which Alobar and his family were barred. These activities seemed to be social in nature, generally merry, and coincided with seasonal observances.
The traditional winter festival, which among Alobar"s folk as well as many other Europeans was celebrated during the twelve days that separated the end of the lunar year (353 days long) from the end of the longer solar year (365 days), and whose purpose it was to equalize the two different celestial years, had been appropriated by the Christians and transformed into a religious holiday called "Christmas." As far as Alobar could determine, Christmas was the same winter festival of yore, except that the profound emotionalism annually precipitated by moon/sun influences the priest here attributed to the natal anniversary of "Christ," a Semitic man-G.o.d whose exact relationship to the One G.o.d Alobar could never quite get straight.
On their first Christmas Day in Aelfric, Frol and Alobar were obliged to spend the entire morning in church, listening to sermons and hymns in a language they could barely understand. Later in the day, they tramped through the snow to the manor house, where the lord served up a mammoth meal for all his serfs. At dusk, Frol and Alobar returned to their cottage to sleep off the food and drink, but long after their candles had been extinguished, lights flickered in the homes of others, as well as in the community lodge, from which laughter and song poured most of the night. The songs that Alobar overheard were most unlike hymns, and the whoops and guffaws that mixed in the clear, frosty air were most unlike prayers, although for his part, Alobar deemed them every bit as G.o.dly. The revelry continued nightly until the sixth day of January, the termination of the twelve-day "lost" or supplementary month.
Since there were similar goings-on at the time of the old spring fertility festival-the priest called it "Easter"-and during the feast of the dead in late October-"All Saint"s Day," according to the Christians; since he and Frol, as newcomers, were never invited; and since the priest steered clear of the merrymaking while the shaman, in a h.o.r.n.y mask, occasionally dropped by, Alobar was to conclude that for all their pious Christian convictions the peasants still clung to the pagan customs that were their archaic heritage.
His conclusion was correct, although a night was fast a-coming when he would wish he was mistaken.
His lips curled over the rim of a cider mug, Alobar sat before the hearth. Outdoors the snow was piled halfway to the Big Dipper, and the earth lay as pa.s.sive as an eyeless potato. More snow was failing, and Alobar praised each and every flake. Onward, snow! The subdued landscape awaits your crystal victory! Although the peasant women busied themselves at the cookpot, the spinning wheel, and the loom, weather had curtailed their husbands" labors, and for this respite Alobar thanked the new G.o.d, the old G.o.ds, the morning star, and the snow itself, for the snow seemed energized and awake in a universe that slumbered like a cadaver.
In front of the crackling fire, Alobar dandled his babies on his knees and at last gave full attention to his lot. How he welcomed this opportunity for uninterrupted thought! Externally and internally, his life had changed dramatically since that silver hair had flagged him down, and though the next day was Christmas, it was not upon the pigs roasting in Lord Aelfric"s ovens nor the epiphanies marinating in the prayer book of the priest that he dwelled, but upon his path from kingship to peasantry and upon what future twists that road might take. A life in progress. A thing to behold.
So lost in reverie was he that when there came a loud banging at the door, he let both his mug and his infants drop to the hearth. The mug rolled into the flames, but the twins, having slightly less rounded contours, stayed where they fell.
Fro! unlatched the door, and out of the dark trooped a snow-dusted band of their neighbors, faces scarlet from cold and strong drink. The villagers embraced them both, not a little lasciviously, and placed wreaths of holly and cedar about their necks. They bade Alobar and Frol accompany them to the community lodge.
Frol was unnerved by the boisterousness of the peasants, normally so sober and staid, but Alobar whispered, "Let us join them. More than a year has pa.s.sed. This is our second Christmas in Aelfric, and finally we"ve been judged trustworthy to partic.i.p.ate in their seasonal fun. By the tone of it, we are about to be included in ceremonies more ancient, more unrestrained, and, I suspect, more heartfelt than any we will share on the morrow."
The entrance to the hall was decorated to resemble the face of a beast, eyes bulging and burning (lanterns inside goat skins), teeth of thin wooden slats. They entered through the mouth of the creature, walking over blood-drenched hides that represented the great animal"s tongue-and const.i.tuted, perhaps, the original red carpet. Inside, the low rafter beams were luxuriously festooned with coniferous boughs, holly, and running cedar, although damp logs smoldering in the fireplace had smoked up the place to the extent that details of the greenery were barely discernible. It didn"t matter, for there could be no mistaking the kegs of cider that rose majestically in the smoke. Frol and Alobar let their cups be filled repeatedly, though in fact most of the liquid was speedily sloshed out by the jostling of fellow citizens as they coaxed the newcomers to join with them in bawdy songs. Frol strained to learn each lyrical indecency, but Alobar simply sang over and over again the only song he knew or had ever known, an epic about battles that were fought long, long ago, back before the morning star impregnated the She-Bear who gave birth to beets.
String and wind instruments were being played inexpertly. Soon, dancing commenced. a.s.sisted by the chemistry of the cider, Alobar and Frol relaxed and slipped into the noisy spirit of things. Frol danced with every clodhopper who asked, while Alobar munched sausages and black puddings and played at dice and cards.
Shortly before midnight, as if by signal, the singing, dancing, and games suddenly stopped. Thinking the party over, Alobar and Frol made to gather their wraps and sleeping babies and go home, but they were told that if they left they would miss the highlight of the season. At that moment, two peasant women, decked out in their finest embroidery, emerged from the greenery that was piled behind the cider kegs. They were carrying a board upon which was balanced a many-layered cake. A table had been moved into the center of the lodge, and upon it the cake was set. The way the men moved in to surround the cake you would have thought a naked maiden was about to jump out of it, but that particular advancement in the baker"s art was nine or ten centuries away.
One of the women took a knife from her fancy ap.r.o.n and began to slice the confection. When it was divided to her satisfaction, the other wife served. One piece at a time was pa.s.sed out, to men only. When all the males, including Alobar, had been served, they began to eat their slices, chewing very slowly, watching carefully all the while the chew motions of their companions; the slow, muscular rise and fall of jaws. Except for the soft chewing, the hall had grown as silent as the gills of a fossil.
The cake was so moist and sweet that Alobar would have been inclined to compliment the chefs, would not the faintest tribute have resounded in the still of the lodge like a falling tree. When he bit into something small and hard, a something that sent a shock of pure hot pain vibrating along the length of a neural wire, he dared not cry out, because if a compliment must be suppressed, then doubly so a complaint. Not wishing to hurt the feelings of the bakers, Alobar removed the object from his mouth as inconspicuously as possible, a gesture doomed to failure, for every smoke-reddened eye in the room was upon him.
Upon examination, the object proved to be easily identifiable, and for all the temporary distress it caused his molar, rather un.o.bjectionable. Since everyone was looking anyway, Alobar, somewhat colored by embarra.s.sment, held it aloft for them to see. "Just a bean," he said shyly. Before the word was fully spoken, a huge roar went up in the lodge. "The bean! The bean! The bean! The bean!" they cried, men and women together, and the villagers advanced on him, slapping his back, mussing his hair, hugging him, and squeezing his private parts. A wooden chair, a rickety imitation of a throne, was fetched and placed beneath a rack of antlers recently nailed to the wall. Alobar was led to the throne and made to sit on it, whereupon, amidst a deafening cacophony of whoops and hollers, belly laughs and sn.i.g.g.e.rs, purposeful belches and equally intentional farts, a lopsided crown of mistletoe was laid atop his head.
When the crowd began addressing him as "king," Alobar gasped. His heart swung off its pendulum, and his blue eyes stiffened like the ponds of December in a bowel-loosening, knee-locking, cider-evaporating attack of deja vu.
"Viva Fabarum Rex!" he seemed to hear them shout, as if through curtains of snow and cake. "Viva Fabarum Rex! Long live the King of the Bean!"
According to custom, the King of the Bean had absolute license. For twelve days following his chance selection, he reigned supreme, ordering his fellows about and indulging his pa.s.sions. He was allowed to wallow in every pleasure, however sinful. No door nor bed was barred to him. At any hour, he might enter another"s house to eat and drink his fill. If he wanted a neighbor"s wife, she was his; likewise any daughter. Obscene behavior, such as urinating on the altar of the church, not only was permitted, it was encouraged. Wherever he went, whatever he did, the Bean King was attended by a rowdy entourage, adjusting his mock crown (so that it always sat askew), pulling at his mock robes (so that they revealed his b.u.t.tocks), plying him with song and cider, cheering him, jeering him, egging him on.
When this was explained to Alobar, he thought, Well, if they desire a king, how fitting it be me. This kingship comes to me by sheer fortune, but I daresay none other is more experienced in the role. True, I had planned to give up these wintry days to contemplation, but it is festival time, and I could use some fun. Frol has satisfied me plenty, but I confess that there be three or four skirts hereabout I would not mind lifting. They wish a monarch, do they? Little do they realize that their bean, in its vegetable wisdom, has selected the one man suited for the job. Haw haw.
Then the peasants explained to him the rest of the custom. At the end of his twelve-day rule, on the Day of the Epiphany, the usual restraints of law and morality were abruptly restored. Still wearing his crooked crown, the King of the Bean was led to a certain meadow outside the village, where his throat was cut.
"Who"s there?"
"Alobar. From the village. I must speak with you. Let me in."
Go away.
"No! I cannot go away. I am the King of the Bean."
Inside the hut there was a laugh, or the ancient animal ancestor of a laugh; a cackle wound like p.r.i.c.kly yarn around the wild spindle in the throat of a fox. "You have strayed from your kingdom, Your Majesty. I am not subject to your authority. In fact, go frig yourself."
Alobar leaned against the shaman"s door. Never had he been so near to weeping. If only he had his beard back so that it might sop up the tears. "You don"t understand. I am not playing games. I am not one of the peasants. I am a king."
"So you informed me. King of the Bean. Go swill another cup of cider, Your Highness. And don"t forget to ask the priest for forgiveness when you kneel in church on the morrow."
Alobar bashed the door down with one furious lunge. He careened inside, sending broken sticks flying, and lifted the shaman from his mattress. Without a painted deer skull over his head, the old man did not seem so formidable. Alobar shook him until his various necklaces of various teeth chattered like a flock of enamel jays.
"All right, all right," said the shaman. "What are you seeking, information or wisdom?"
"Er . . . why ... uh ... wisdom!"
"In that case, you"re out of luck. Wisdom takes a long time, and you"re going to be dead in twelve days."
Alobar threw the shaman onto his tick. "No, I am not!" he screamed, stamping his feet. "No, I am not!"
"Oh? You"re not? But you are "king" and thus condemned." The shaman grinned like a weasel running errands for the moon.
"I am twice king and twice condemned-and I am sick and tired of it. First a hair and then a bean. If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es; let him swing a scythe and make horrible noises, let him come for me in person, not send some hair, some f.u.c.king little black bean baked in a goody by mutton-b.u.t.t peasant wives. Even then I might not go. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business."
A glimmer of interest showed in the shaman"s eyes. He raised himself on his k.n.o.bby hips. He glanced at the snow that was sifting over the contents of his hut. "Do you feel a bit of a draft? Here, help me hang this skin over the door. Then I"ll brew us some mushroom tea, and we can discuss your problem."
While his host hunkered over the diminutive adobe hearth, Alobar sniffed at the various braids of dried vegetable matter that hung against the walls, each broadcasting a different version of internal conditions within the plant kingdom, and he fingered the bones, fangs, and snail sh.e.l.ls that, like chimes to be rung by the shaman"s heavy breathing, dangled from the ceiling. Each fragment of flora and fauna had been removed from its original context and juxtaposed incongruously, yet each seemed perfectly in place. The party in Alobar"s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged. Torn between showing this thought to the door or seating it in a place of honor, Alobar was relieved of the dilemma by a steaming teacup, shoved into his grasp.
The shaman sipped ritualistically. Alobar told his whole story. When only the dregs were left of the one"s tea and the other"s tale, the shaman took several short pieces of string from his pocket and began to knot them together, mumbling all the while. "In my net," he mumbled, "I bind the sobs of the dark ice cracking. In my net I bind the ax"s response to the pinecone. I bind the larva"s curved belly. I bind the hole in the sky where the comets escape. I bind the roots of the rainbow and the flight of the alder." He went on and on in that manner-"My net binds the hornet"s deaf grandmother" -until Alobar was ready to grab him and give him another shaking.
Just as Alobar reached the end of his patience, the shaman unclasped his hands, revealing the pieces of string, which in the knotting, had turned into a delicate violet, its petals the color of love bites on a collarbone. Alobar reached for the flower, but it burst into flame and was consumed in the shaman"s fingers without burning them. It was Alobar"s turn to mumble. "In the future I shall be more careful about whose door I knock down," he said, mopping up with his sleeve the tea he had spilled in his astonishment.
The shaman laughed. "Don"t pay any attention to that old magic," he said. "It used to be powerful, but now it is only the pastime of a few crazy old farts who remember how to talk with weeds." Alobar sought to protest, but the shaman interrupted. "Man is turning away from the plants and animals," he said. "Slowly he is breaking his bond with them. Someday he will have to reestablish contact, if the universe is to survive. For now, however, it is probably best that he set out on his own in his new direction."
"How so?"
"A salamander can be only a salamander, an elk an elk, and a bush a bush. True, a bush is complete in its bushness, yet its limits, while not nearly so severe as some foolish men would believe, are fairly obvious. The peasants of Aelfric are like bushes, like salamanders. They were born one thing and will die one thing. But you . . . you have already been a warrior, a king, and a serf, and from the looks of it, you aren"t through yet. Thus, you have learned the secret of the new direction. That is: a man can be many things. Maybe anything.
"In the past, there was little separation between the lives of plants and animals and the lives of men. Nowadays, there are men who practice separation, not only from the creatures but from other men. The Romans with their Christianity have promoted the idea of the human individual. But you are neither Roman nor Christian, and you are no less smitten, so perhaps the spirit is in the air. The Romans encourage individualism, but they maintain rigid controls. Sooner or later, men will come along whose belief in the supremacy of the exceptional, extraordinary, isolated individual will cause them to declare themselves exempt from controls. In their uniqueness, they will not hesitate to defy accepted standards. Oh, these men will give Rome-and the Romes that shall follow Rome-a very large headache. You, Alobar, I suspect, are among the first of such men.
"No, no, do not object. I can tell that my words both delight and excite you."
It was true. And in his delightment and excitement, Alobar had let his tea grow cold, so the shaman warmed his cup.
"Were you an ordinary peasant, I would dazzle you with another trick or two; I"d berate you and comfort you and send you back to Aelfric to face your death without alarm. Most of the peasants are content to die. For them, death means the cessation of toil. At last they can drop their soiled and battered bodies and enter the dimension of pure spirit. Plants and animals are even more comfortable with death. It is the natural end. But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
"If you were an ordinary serf, I would send you back to Aelfric to a.s.sist your neighbors in the public purification they undergo at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, to help them mock the things they love best in order that they might revere them the more. I"d send you back to wear the sacred mistletoe, to be King of the Bean, to be sacrificed to the good old G.o.ddess of agriculture. Instead, I encourage you to ride this strange wind that is blowing through you; to ride it to wherever it will carry you."
"But which way shall I go?"
"That is between you and the wind. You seem to be searching for a kind of immortality. With that I cannot help you. In the realms that I inhabit, death is a companion. One does not quarrel with one"s friend. If you desire to meet masters with power over death, I suggest you travel to the distant east."
"As far as h.e.l.las?"
"Far, far beyond h.e.l.las."
"To Egypt, then?" In Alobar"s mind, Egypt, with its confounding mirrors, was the end of the trolley line.
"As far as Egypt is, you must go three times that far."
"Three times farther than Egypt? Are you trying to trick me? I would fall over the edge of the earth!"
The shaman snorted with laughter. "Alobar. The earth does not have an edge."
It was Alobar"s turn to laugh. He thought he might be in the company of a crazy old fart, after all. "What utter nonsense," he declared.
"You are a free and special man, Alobar. Therefore I"m going to let you in on a little secret. Listen. I converse regularly with the birds and the fish. And the birds and the fish have a.s.sured me many times that there isn"t any edge. We live on a ball, Alobar. We do. Keep this quiet: the world is round."
So heady was the idea that Alobar felt feint. He gulped his tea and gazed into the shaman"s eyes-eyes as shiny and black as the bean in the cake-to ascertain that he was not being joshed. When he was convinced of the shaman"s sincerity, he stood and gathered his hides about him. "I suppose I should be off then."
"I suppose you should."
"I surmise that several Feasts of Feasts will be consumed ere I am returned. However, I should be pleased to build you a strong new door when next I pa.s.s this way."
"You plan to return, then?"
"If the world be round, I can scarcely help it." He chuckled. "Someday, I should like to mingle with my clan again, even if I must disguise myself to do so."
The shaman shook his head. "I have it on good authority that Lord Aelfric"s men are going to attack your old citadel as soon as the roads are dry in spring. They will kill all who resist and baptize the remainder. Long before you return-if you return-the independent city you once ruled will be but another Roman outpost on the frontiers of the Holy Empire."
Alobar smacked his palm with his fist. "Then I must warn the clan! I"ll organize a defense! Maybe we"ll attack first! By the golden whiskers of the morning star, we"ll show those turnip eaters what battle"s about! They"ll need more than one G.o.d to save their a.s.ses ere I and my boys are through, blah blah blah ..."
"Too late, Alobar, too late." As if to somehow ill.u.s.trate his point, the shaman tore a badger mask from the wall and tossed it into the fire. "The foe is not merely Lord Aelfric but the whole of the empire. It is too large, too entrenched, has too much momentum. The world is changing, Alobar." He gestured at the burning mask. "Don"t waste your life trying to hold back the tides of history. History begot Rome, and history someday will bury it. In the meantime, you"ve other fish to fry. Have you forgotten? Are you to be an individual, a trespa.s.ser in territory none else has had the wit or nerve to explore, or just another troublesome mosquito to be swatted by the authorities? You"re no longer king or warrior, remember, but something new. It will do your clansmen no good for you to be slain alongside them, but who can guess what benefits may result from a new life wholly led?"
"You are correct," said Alobar. He sighed. "The clan, its l.u.s.ty women and its n.o.ble hounds, lies behind me. It is forward I must go."
After embracing the old man, he marched out into the snow. He aimed his boots at the east and forced his heels to follow his toes. Quickly, the little hut of the shaman was out of view. Out of sight, too, was the village and the manor.
Frol must suspect that I am taking swift advantage of my beanship, straddling another"s thighs at this late hour, he thought. He sensed that he was causing her some pain, and that, in turn, hurt him. He would miss Frol and the babies, perhaps more intensely than he missed Wren and Mik. But there was a strange wind blowing through him, was there not? Was it not blowing him away?
The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur. The cry of an owl, brooding over its ruby appet.i.tes, cut through the frigid air like a vibrating pin. Then, all was silent except for the soft crunch, like ants chewing wax, of his boats upon the snow. His steps chickened. They took on a gay rhythm. He was very nearly dancing across the frozen fields.
"The world is round," he sang, in tune with his footfalls.
"Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things.
"I am special and free.
"And the world is round round round."
A few weeks later, Alobar was awakened by a hot sun in his face and a hot stench in his nostrils. He sat up in the gra.s.s and rubbed his eyes. Don"t ask where the rest of that dream went, Alobar. All dreams continue in the beyond.
The warm sunlight gave him a lazy, comfortable, lie-around-all-morning-and~-scratch-your-armpits feeling, but inside his nose the cilia were waving, the turbinates were knocking, and the sphenoethmoidal recess was on red alert: by Woden"s honey pots, what a scent!
Nearby, a flock was grazing, and Alobar guessed the aroma must be its fault, but fie on wool and a pox on mutton if sheep were so rude to the proboscis. Perhaps in warm climates, sheep take on the odor of their cousins, thought Alobar, for surely it was the essence of goat that permeated his nasal pa.s.sages, and rutting goat at that.
With a flock so close, there must be a shepherd in the vicinity. Maybe I can talk him out of a few crumbs of breakfast ere I get me to a prettier-smelling place. Alobar went to rise but something snagged his cloak and pulled him back down. Again he tried to stand, again he was yanked to the sod. He reached behind him to free himself from the branch or vine that held him, but he touched nothing. Scooting forward a few feet on his rump, he made another attempt at rising, and another and another, each with the same result. Angry and a little frightened, he drew his knife and, still sitting, whirled around. There was no one behind him. With all of the elastic in his leg muscles, he snapped himself upward. Thud! Down he went like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.
This time he just sat there, fingering his blade, giving every sheep on the hillside a good look at his expression of frustration, bewilderment, and humiliation. Nearly a quarter of an hour pa.s.sed before, very slowly, centimeter by centimeter, sinew by sinew, he commenced cautiously to draw himself upright. And he made it! He was standing! He stretched, expelled a sigh of relief that fluttered the lashes of a ewe twenty yards away, and strode off, only in midstride to fall flat on his new growth of beard.
An outburst of wild, magnificent laughter resounded over the hillside and echoed from the crags in the distance; wild laughter because its notes were outside the range of the normal human voice and so uninhibited as to make the shaman"s cackle seem fettered; magnificent laughter because it seemed huge in scope and rare in distribution; laughter that was simultaneously strange and familiar and that instilled in Alobar the fear of the unknown and the joy of self-recognition. It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon"s a.s.s.
The laughter evidently affected the sheep, for all at once they began to bleat and kick, the oldest rams in the flock cavorting as if they were lambs. A breeze suddenly raked the landscape, drawing from the gra.s.ses a dark murmuring, and setting the thistle bushes to chattering like thin teeth. Bees abandoned the gorse to fly in crazy circles a few feet above ground, while the birdsong that previously had gladdened the hillside lowered appreciably in volume, its capricious trills and whistles replaced by a consistent melodic line, almost reverent in tone. The unease that Alobar experienced was as piercing as a thorn, yet there was a pleasant tightening in his groin, and his limbs felt ticklish and kinetic, inspired beyond his control to join the flock in its awkward dance. The way he found himself moving horizontally through the gra.s.s made him wonder if he had not been seized by the Serpent Power, if there were not an edge, after all, and if he were not dangerously close to it.
"Hey!" a voice called out. "Why doth thy crawl about on thy belly? Art thou a man or a worm?"
Compelled by the voice, which was both dreadful and jolly, threatening and seductive, Alobar forgot his recent failures and scrambled to his feet. "Where are you?" he asked in a shaky falsetto. "Why are you laughing?"
"I am everywhere," the voice boomed. "And why shouldn"t a G.o.d laugh at the puny endeavors of man?"
It was then that Alobar"s battle-trained vision focused on the leer in the leaves. At first, the leer was all that he could see, but then he caught sight of a s.h.a.ggy tail and realized that it was connected to the leer. (The tail bone frequently is connected to the leer bone, although today that connection is illegal in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.) In a moment, the bushes parted and into the pasture pranced an unbelievable creature, all woolly and goatlike from its waist down to its hooves; human and masculine above. Or, to be precise, human above save for a pair of stubby horns thrusting like bronze-tipped beet-diggers in the bright mountain air.
"You-you are the-the Horned One," stammered Alobar.
The creature gamboled closer, dispelling any doubts about the origin of the stench. "In some places they know me as that. Herebouts, they call me Pan." He paused. "Those who still honor me, that is." He paused again. "And who might thou be? And what is thy mission?"
"Alobar, once king, once serf, now individual-have you heard of individuals?-free and hungry, at your service. My mission? Well, frankly, I am running away from death."
Pan"s hooves, which had been pawing the turf in an almost drunken little fandango, became gradually immobile, and the leer slowly slid off his face as if some weak but persistent hand had shoved it. His thick lips dipped downward in a solemn arc, and in his goatish eyes woe replaced mischief. "I, too," he said.
"What"s that?" asked Alobar.
"Art thou so famished that thou cannot hear? I said that I, too, am running from death."
"But that couldn"t be! You are a G.o.d. Are not the G.o.ds immortal?"
"Not quite. True, we art immune to the chills and accidents that swallow up humanity, but G.o.ds can die. We live only so long as people believe in us."